I've been mulling something over in my head that I have debated making a longer post about and I have decided to actually do it. I'm gonna write down a dissection of how I have, so far, read Roboute Guilliman across the books I've actually read.
It concerns Guilliman's functioning in interpersonal situations. In larger fan culture he is often either depicted as a walking, talking calculator (flat depiction that isn't wrong but also deep as a puddle) or The Sensible One. Which is slightly off the mark. He's, in my opinion, not sensible as much as a bit insane in his own way. Arguably no less than his brothers.
For the following analysis I will be using Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar (David Annandale), Know No Fear (Dan Abnett), The Unremembered Empire (Dan Abnett), Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son (Guy Haley) primarily. I have not read Dark Imperium yet (I know, bit of a poor showing for an analysis of his brain) but I guess I would like to get this out of my head and probably update my findings later when/if anything changes.
Obviously all these books span different authors which means a lot could be traced back to variations in characterization. But I wanted to treat this as an exercise of actually connecting things in the text.
More accurately it is a reading of is interpersonal functioning primarily in 30k and up to the first months after his resurrection. I have not read Everything There is to Read about him (yet) and I didn't read Ruinstorm or most of Pharos. (or Ashes of the Imperium for that matter).
Warning: This is long. Like Absurdly long. About 3600 words of my own thoughts, and that isn't accounting for all the screenshots as evidence.
The Statesman's Charisma
I feel like his depiction in fandom often veers into him just being A Normal Guy with great social skills, because he has charisma, he is a statesman, he can move a crowd.
Except... he kind of isn't all that. While his public skills genuinely are incredible, his intimate functioning is actually kind of poor. And this part isn't something i am imagining. It is expressed by his son Vitrian Messinius in Avenging Son.
'The smile felt calculated' being the relevant factor. I don't think it should be read as manipulation. He can be manipulative, but that is not what he is doing here, at least not totally. I want to highlight in this text that Guilliman both does care and does calculate and both of these aspects are not contradictory to him because of the way he processes emotions - both those of strangers and his own - and how he tries to interact with the world.
I do believe Guilliman is genuine in this scene. For one, he gives his son a pile of absolutely priceless weapons (and I sometimes wonder if he is doing this also because he wants his Firstborn sons to feel valued after the unveiling of the Primaris Marines. Guilliman can and does make calculations like that.) But something far more important he offers is something that most people in the setting, especially space marines, seldom get: he gives Messinius a choice.
The mechanics of this truly being a choice can be argued; Guilliman is coercive just by existing in a room. Most of his sons will defer to him even when offered this choice. But I do not believe this is calculation either, because Guilliman has tried to cultivate an atmosphere of orderly dissent as far back as the Great Crusade:
(The whole mess with Hierax and how much Guilliman actually tolerates dissent is another can of worms that I don't want to get into here. Suffice to say, he is not as open-minded as he wants to be, which is another blindspot.)
My point is that, at least consciously, Guilliman wants people to disagree with him and make their own choices, therefore I assume his offer to Messinius in this scene was genuine, even if his son never would have taken it.
Obviously this scene is from the POV of Messinius, and therefore an outside view of Guilliman. These books are full of incredibly unreliable narrators, but I find Messinius' POV more interesting than most for this purpose, because he displays an understanding of Guilliman that not even all of his sons from the Heresy Era had. He understands that his Gene-Father, though Messinius adores him and considers him transcendent, is deeply vulnerable and flawed.
Guilliman is human. He feels like one, he often acts like one. Cruelly though, he was born with a human soul and yet lacking, in some ways, the means to actually intuitively connect to other beings.
To explain why I think this, I am going to now make a very, very long leap way back to the Great Crusade.
Guilliman's "Naivety"
I think my favorite to start with is that his Psyker son Titus Prayto, who he seemingly uses as an ambulatory therapist in The Unremembered Empire (this is only slightly an exaggeration as demonstrated later), notes the following about his father.
Childlike naivety is not how you'd expect a primarch to be described, but this Psyker in particular would know him better than quite a few people, as Prayto has the unique privilege to look into his mind. Guilliman takes him into his personal service after realizing that Nikea was a mistake, he does not even know if Terra still stands because he is cut off by the Ruinstorm, and Calth has had him realize that he is outmatched without a better understanding of the warp.
Oddly, however, Prayto also serves the role of the guy helping the traumatized primarch understand himself and his trauma along with being a tactical nuke and warp interpreter.
Quite a burden to place on his (very polite) son.
Calling it naivety reads as strange initially: he is a two centuries old warlord, he has slaughtered billions, he rules an interstellar empire. He is unbelievably smart, a god of a processor, capable of understanding multiple strands of information at once. But it is actually a somewhat apt term when looking at Guilliman's interpersonal behavior across multiple books in the heresy.
Over the course of Unremembered Empire, Guilliman nearly falls prey to an assassination attempt by Alpha Legion infiltrators. I have wanted to dissect this moment for a while, because the way he falls or it is somewhat tragic.
It is Guilliman's good faith, trust in the security of his home and desperate need to reconnect with a friend that nearly gets him killed.
These Alpha Legionnaires masquerade as his sons, particularly Aeonid Thiel. When he hears of "Thiel's" return, Guilliman pretty much immediately gets up to reconnect with one of his favored sons, and upon first seeing him again, notes that his armor is scorched and the man seems permanently on guard.
Guilliman mistakes this as damage done to him by the permanent state of war inflicted on his son's psyche on Calth.
Regardless, he tries to greet him warmly and get him to relax in a safe space:
Thiel proceeds to introduce him to five battle brothers he'd like his Gene-Father to meet. Guilliman allows this without truly questioning it.
Guilliman is genuinely, absurdly kind to them in this scene. I cannot quote all of it, but he wants them to be comfortable. He is compassionate. He wants connection. He builds a narrative for the behavior he is seeing that makes sense within his worldview, and what he currently needs the world to be.
He then slowly realizes that he basically mistook their cageyness and unwillingness to let go of their armor as battle conditioning (the way it is described almost sounds like he's picturing a form of PTSD to be honest.)
In reality though, they are cagey and will not take off their armor or remove their helmets or let go of their weapons because they're assassins making use of his blind spots to get him to let down his guard, and they almost succeed. Guilliman barely survives the attempt on his life.
There is an undercurrent to many of the actions he has taken. A denial of what is happening and has been happening to him since the heresy started. This denial is actually somewhat addressed in Lord of Ultramar as already being present long, long before the Heresy happens:
This scene reads as really esoteric without the context behind it but basically, I think it points as a part of him that somehow knew that the Imperium was doomed to fail. On the surface, he is simply reacting to his sons not acting as they should and causing infrastructure collapse, blanketing the whole environment in a cloud of dust that momentarily blinds his senses. It, however, gnaws at his already crumbling certainty after Monarchia, and this, combined with the crawling realization that the human ruins he wanted to preserve in this book were just military installations (this entire book is basically him trying to prove to himself that he is more than just a weapon after Monarchia kinda traumatized him, and actively trying to scrub the traces of dirty warfare from his Legion), keeps attacking his deep-seated desire to believe in the Great Crusade and his father's dream.
But he could not accept it.
He would rather see nothing than damnation.
This denial is something he himself actually later recognizes in Lord of Ultramar also.
In the pain of the years ahead, he did not often think back to this moment. It would be superseded by far worse memories, and far worse agony, far worse narratives. But even in that period of cursed innocence between Thoas and Calth, when so much of what he believed was burning and he did not know it, he did not like to think of this moment. He willed his mind to slide over the memory when he considered Thoas. There was much he would choose to put aside about the world. He would tell himself the memories and the thoughts they engendered were unprofitable. That they were irrelevant or worse. Their suppression was an active good.
This is a retrospective excerpt following the collapse of infrastructure caused by one of his Marines not following orders, which was an indirect result of the friction caused by the attempt to overwrite the culture of the 22nd Chapter.
Denial is something he indulges in frequently, and he'll do so while telling himself that it is for the greater good.
So when he hears of Thiel coming to Macragge, I believe that he really just needs it to be true. He wants it to be true. And Guilliman, especially during the Great Crusade, seems to act on what he wants the world to be rather than what it is more often than not.
I don't remember where, but I once saw him described as the most idealistic of the Primarchs, and I 100% believe it. I also do not think this is a virtue. This is a fatal flaw. More on that later.
In the aftermath of this attempt on his life, Guilliman has a minor cry in his study.
He looks at the broken remains of his father's old cogitator and feels unexpected sentiment. He is clearly not crying about the old device here, but what it represents. Ultramar, his shattered dreams lying at his feet. The ideals that he got from both his father figures - Konor on one hand, and the emperor on the other. Prayto breaks this down to being broken about Horus, but I think that is a bit too simple also. He is processing, for the first time, that everything he loved and worked for has fallen apart. Sometimes these emotions will not catch up to a person in the moment until they see something specific and personal destroyed. Guilliman, however, does not have a framework for identifying this. He has to speak with Prayto about what the hell he is feeling, and why.
Guilliman is watching his world break apart in front of him and can barely process the emotions happening to him. He is both willing to let a trusted (Psyker!!) son see it, and to lean on him for interpretation where his own mind is failing him, and for support while he desperately needs to be left in peace as he falls apart.
What I garnered from these scenes in the book is that, at least during the Heresy days, he is not necessarily closed off by nature, but the functioning of his mind is alien enough to humans and often even to him that the genuine connection he does need does not come easily to him, and sometimes, not at all. He suffers from translation problems between himself and others.
He can and does trust. He wants to trust. In fact, I think his desire for relationships that make sense to him and are legible to him often override him in situations were suspicion would have served him better, but possibly rendered him a worse leader overall.
This inherent need to trust and find common ground with people, combined with his apparent need to deny even that which is right in front of him also showed in his hesitation to believe that Lorgar had actively betrayed him in Know no Fear.
Guilliman has been called to muster most of his troops by Warmaster Horus, and to converge there with the Word Bearers. Naturally, this is actually an elaborate plan to stab the Avenging Son in the back, cripple his Legion, summon the Ruinstorm and keep them trapped in Ultramar while the traitors wreak havoc on the Imperium.
Guilliman's first assumption after being fired at while his orbital shipyards implode and a giant voidship slips from its construction cradle towards the surface of Calth, his beloved new jewel in the crown of Ultramar... is that Lorgar and his Legion simply made a mistake.
It took a massive mountain of evidence to convince him of Lorgar's malicious intent. The flip afterwards is immediate. Guilliman's speech towards Lorgar is pretty well known, I think.
'Lorgar of Colchis. You may consider the following. One: I entirely withdraw my previous offer of solemn ceasefire. It is cancelled, and will not be made again, to you or to any other of your motherless bastards. Two, you are no longer any brother of mine. I will find you, I will kill you, and I will hurl your toxic corpse into hell's mouth.'
(Calling Lorgar's sons motherless bastards is hilarious considering all of his own sons are also functionally motherless.)
This is pretty badass on its own, but also part of a pattern because fury is one of his responses when things don't go the way he believes they should.
The notable thing here however is that Guilliman would not believe that Lorgar had acted out of malice despite thinking quite poorly of Lorgar:
This is something he dumps on Aeonid Thiel (another scene of incredible Guillimanesque social functioning but if I get into that here I might never stop writing.)
He is acutely aware of Lorgar's flaws. And yet, he somehow cannot actually emotionally comprehend that Lorgar acted the way he did. I am certain a major amount of it is denial that I delved into earlier, but the trust is also immense. Trust in a shared goal, in a shared universe, in a united brotherhood that makes sense. He would not have built a room with 21 seats in them if he had not idealistically believed and trusted in all of this. And like I said. Guilliman seems to act upon how he believes the world should be more than it truly is.
He tries to approximate what constitutes the world, that is why he obsessively collects information about everything. He needs it legible, categorizable, because that is how he engages with and structures reality.
But because of this mode of functioning, genuine connection comes to him even less intuitively than perhaps for many of his brothers.
Guilliman's Isolation
Furthermore, I think this lack of genuine connection even extends to them. There's a segment in Know No Fear where Guilliman reflects on his relation to most of the primarchs. It is technically narration, but it is written like it mostly reflects his own thoughts.
The description is weirdly distant and also seems to attempt to categorize what does and doesn't bridge him with his brothers. Notably, the narration carries an undertone of natural arrogance. Guilliman has that as I suspect most primarchs do, and while he often tries to perform humility, the arrogance and paternalism run quite deep and do often render him blind to things even when he is trying to be self-aware. (This shows a lot in Lord of Ultramar but honestly that deserves its own post.)
What I find most telling though is this:
He doesn't feel like most of his brothers trust him, because he always thinks in strategic advantages, in benefits. Outwardly, few things he does are just him. Or rather, they are, but because his mode of functioning is not really intuition-based, it might in fact be them picking up on his internal calculus the same way Messinius did in Avenging Son.
The list of brothers he thinks actually like him is even more tragic. Horus has already betrayed them at this point, Ferrus is dead (and did not return the sentiment from what I know,) Sanguinius will die, and he and Dorn will have a rather poor relationship later in part thanks to the Codex Astartes.
(Notably I am not sure if any of the Primarchs were free of struggling with isolation, since they all were thrust into a system where their only peers are their (supposedly) 19 siblings who they're also in intense competition with, and their programming asks that they love a man who may or may not have loved them back. I know more about Guilliman by far than the rest of them combined.)
My point which I have kind of lost track of here is that he feels trusted by very few and has not had good rapport with three of the four he considers friends. Despite this, he does not consider any of them a threat. In fact, he actively labeled the simulation of how to fight other space marines an offense worthy of censure. This despite him being the guy who openly preaches being prepared for every situation.
Guilliman trusts in his worldview even when he is not trusted back, and he knows he is not trusted back. He trusted Horus' order for the Calth muster, because he reasons it must be Horus trying to reconnect his Ultramarines Legion with the Word Bearers after the catastrophic events of Monarchia. He trusts Lorgar to not have bad intentions, because he manages to reason himself into a narrative that makes sense to him. Guilliman is IMMENSELY smart, but he cannot truly comprehend how other people think, neither mortals nor his own brothers, who should be closer to him in functioning.
He consistently tries to reason himself into how people feel, but he cannot easily actually access it.
This is actually a severe blind spot.
In Lord of Ultramar (love that book, kinda mediocre plot, extremely fun dissection material for his brain) as I mentioned before, it causes Guilliman to underestimate the friction generated by placing a non-Chapter Astartes in charge of the 22nd, also known as the Nemesis chapter. Guilliman does not like their heavy reliance on Phosphex and other destructive weaponry and tries to change the chapter culture from within by placing a Captain from another Chapter in charge. Naturally, predictably, this causes a minor catastrophe when disobedience leads to half the Chapter being buried under collapsing infrastructure. If he had taken a moment to actually listen to his son Marius Gage:
or taken an extra moment to speak to and actually listen to his sons, or focused on the micro rather than the macro for the entire mission, perhaps the pyramids would not have collapsed on his sons and killed many of them. (Which does not mean the Captains were not being idiotic in that scene. These are still grown men acting like children. )
Combined with his idealism, this has also led him to participate in the Great Crusade in full fervor. He is a conqueror and a warlord, and though he thought himself as a bringer of reason and enlightenment, I reckon few warlords in history considered themselves monsters in their own stories. He needed it to be true because he wanted a world that makes sense, that can be solved, that will become stable if enough effort is applied to it.
It is not a lack of care on his behalf. He cares a lot. But he can be monstrous when something or someone gets in the way of his plans. He is intensely paternal. Guilliman knows best, and if he doesn't, you better prove it to him. Because as I mentioned, while Guilliman wants dissent, he wants it within a reasonable frame. The unspoken catch being that he decides what 'within reason' is.
If something shatters his worldview, his fury is intense. His crashout in The Unremembered Empire is something I rarely see spoken about, but the way he lashes out at people because of being confronted with something he doesn't want to accept is lowkey crazy.
Obviously he is already extremely frayed and on the edge here, so his reaction is likely worsened by the preceding trauma, the assassination attempt, the situation with the Lion, the Ruinstorm, everything. But at its core, it still shows that Guilliman does not like it at all when things don't go the way he wanted, expected, or reasoned. He can, in fact, explosively lose his temper at people who have done nothing to him except being subjected to the same strange situation as he is.
In Conclusion
This was a very long-winded way to say that Guilliman has been somewhat isolated for most of his life, and the isolation stems in part from his nature, and in part from the way he processes human experiences: he runs them through the framework he uses to process everything, and then ends up stumped when other people don't think 'rationally' like he does (he doesn't, and he hilariously often knows he doesn't, which is also visible in another scene in Lord of Ultramar where he actively audits his own desire to punch the orks in the face before giving himself permission to do it). He categorizes people and approaches most things from multiple angles of benefit, which can be alienating to people. He is cognitively able to reason what people might be thinking and feeling, but he cannot easily intuit his way into it, and that combined with his massive gap in intellect, his aura causing people to prostrate themselves, his intense need to be in control and his unnatural warp-weirdness causes him to be stilted in intimate social functions. This has obviously compounded massively after his resurrection because not only is he STILL alien to standard humans, but the world has also catastrophically stopped making sense to him.
